Get Your Website Discovered with StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon, a social bookmarking site, has outlasted much of its competition. Only a few years ago, the Internet was seemingly overflowing with services, such as Blink and Backflip, that promised to allow users to show off fun new sites they had found or to rely on the wisdom of the crowd to find the latest, hottest Internet meme of the moment.

For a while, the lists of chiclets (tiny icons representing these social bookmarking sites) were growing so extensive that they were longer than many of the blog posts they accompanied. But a funny thing happened on the way to universal oneness: Users started rebelling against all the chaos, and many of these sites withered away.

StumbleUpon, as one of the survivors, has built a strong inventory of tools for site designers to share their content with an installed user base of more than 10 million. Experts say that because of the way StumbleUpon consistently reaches into its database to recommend sites to its users, having users submit and like a page contributes more to long-term traffic than the brief spikes you gain from other sharing services.

You have to sign up for the service (don’t worry — it’s free), and then you can either create a standard badge to display on your site or, if you're comfortable with using JavaScript, you can custom-create a StumbleUpon badge. Some useful JSON source code for you to experiment with is provided at Badge API Documentation.

To truly leverage the social part of a social bookmarking site such as StumbleUpon, you must do more than include this badge on your website. You have to engage with the other users on StumbleUpon by chatting with them about the links they like, voting on their submissions, and generally participating in the community.